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Better late than never: Hits, words, hate for Bruins-Capitals

WASHINGTON – How might Brad Marchand, the Bruins’ resident wordsmith, summarize the direction in which the Eastern Conference quarterfinals is headed?

“The more you play each other, the more you hate each other,” Marchand said after the Bruins’ 4-3 victory over the Capitals.

The chances of this series turning into Pittsburgh-Philadelphia are as slim as those of the Bruins scoring multiple power play goals in a game, but the teeth are starting to show.

There’s more stuff after the whistle. Guys are chirping and getting in one another’s faces. Last but not least, Bruins fans should be getting the “how long until Milan Lucic takes a bad penalty?” feeling that only comes in these overly emotional games.

It’s playoff hockey and the teams don’t like each other.

While the Bruins and Capitals were playing for just as much in the first two games of the series in Boston, Games 1 and 2 were defensive ballet recitals. Both teams were more focused on strategically winning the games with tight defense and blocked shots. The result was two close games and, aside from an Alexander Ovechkin cross-check on Dennis Seidenberg in Game 2, little of the extracurricular stuff.

That changed Monday at the Verizon Center. Milan Lucic and Brooks Laich played footsie before a second-period faceoff in the neutral zone, with Lucic eventually quitting the struggle by throwing Laich to the ice. The play landed both players in the box for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Early in the third period, Brad Marchand was hit in the last place a man wants to feel pain when Jason Chimera speared him in the crotch. Marchand fell to the ice in pain before being joined by trainer Don DelNegro. Things had gotten ugly, and in Marchand’s case, painful.

The big fireworks happened late in the period, and they came in waves. First, Lucic got tangled up with Matt Hendricks following a cross-check from Dennis Wideman with the B’s on the power play. Karl Alzner jumped in and made a crying gesture at Lucic after the situation was broken up by officials.

"Well, there's a lot of [proof] on my side to show that I'm not a crybaby," Lucic said after the game. "That's a lot coming from a guy I think who's got two roughing penalties in three years, so there you go.”

Thanks to some tireless work from WEEI’s Michael Berger, we can confirm that Alzner does indeed have two roughing penalties in his career. One of them came this season against Lucic, as the two received matching roughing penalties on March 10.

In Lucic’s mind, perhaps there’s another penalty Alzner should have received Monday. Alzner seemed to clearly be the third man in when Lucic and Hendricks were sparring. That should carry a game misconduct, but nothing was called. Asked after the game whether he felt Alzner was the third man in, Lucic grinned and chose his words carefully before simply responding, “Yup.”

A war of words? Could it be? This series, initially an exclusively defensive struggle with more strategy than snarl, is slowly starting to fill out. What it lacked in flaring tempers it now has. Guys are pulling stunts, and – in a Tuukka Rask-like attempt at keeping it clean – ticking each other off.

“It always [gets increasingly emotional],” Shawn Thornton said. “It's a team that you play four times a year. They're not an in-division rival. I think every year, every series is the same thing. As you go, it gets a little bit grittier and grittier because there's a little bit more on the line.”

Speaking of lines, the only thing the players need to worry about in heated games such as Monday’s is whether they cross it. Nicklas Backstrom appeared to do just that at the end of the game. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, Backstrom cross-checked Rich Peverley in the face. He was given a match penalty, which carries with it an automatic one-game suspension, pending a review by the league.

Claude Julien didn’t like what he saw from Backstrom, who is Washington’s best center and the scorer of the game-winning goal in overtime in Game 2. Julien hasn’t liked what he’s seen from the Capitals in general when it comes to cross-checking. Though it had otherwise been a clean series for the first two games, Julien looked back to the aforementioned Ovechkin/Seidenberg play and a Jay Beagle cross-check (called high-sticking) on David Krejci that left Krejci with stitches on his philtrum.

“I think that it’s normal that there’s some intensity and the rivalry is getting better and bigger as we move forward here,” Claude Julien said. “You understand that those kinds of things are going to happen. The only thing that’s a little disappointing, for me personally, is the fact that this is the third time in three games our player has been cross checked in the face.

“We saw the one on Krejci where he was cut in Game 1, and Ovechkin on Seidenberg in Game 2 and now Backstrom. You hope those things don’t get out of hand. I’m going to say the same thing I said last time: Somebody else has to deal with that and it’s not us. As a coach, I’m going to continue to get my team ready for the next game.”

Regardless of what the league does, the Game 4 on Thursday – and the rest of the games this series – will have emotions both on display and likely boiling over. Again, it’s the playoffs. These teams aren’t going to forget about one another the more they see each other. They’re only going to get more and more familiar with one another.

“That's what a playoff series is all about,” Lucic said. “When the score is close and teams are definitely fighting to win games and to move on, tempers are going to flare. It was just a matter of time before things were going to heat up.”

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